Apache Tomcat (or simply Tomcat) is an open source servlet container developed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The latest major stable release, Apache Tomcat version 7 implements the Servlet 3 and JavaServer Pages 2 specifications from the Java Community Process, and includes many additional features that make it a useful platform for developing and deploying web applications and web services. Apache Tomcat 7 Essentials follows a practical approach to teach installing, configuring, and maintaining Tomcat. It helps you to understand the middle architecture for hosting multiple websites and also provides the confidence to implement middleware support. It imparts to you the capacity to resolve migration issues and also provides regular maintenance solutions. This is the first and only book to cover upgrading to Tomcat 7 from previous versions. The journey of the reader starts at the beginner level and ends at the expert level. The content is designed in such a way that it balances the theory and practical approach for understanding concepts related to handling middle ware and web issues. In this book, you will go through a three-phase life cycle. The first cycle consists of installation, configuration of Tomcat 7 on different OS, and other configurations related to JDBC, port, deployment etc. The second phase deals with the building of enterprise application setup and high availability architecture (clustering load balancing). The third and critical phase will teach you to handle critical issues, performance tuning, and best practices for various environment stacks like dev/QA/stage/production. This book gives you a wider vision of using Tomcat 7 in web technologies and the skill to optimize their performance using Apache Tomcat 7.